Both children and toys wear exaggerated expressions, but expressions that do not seem unnatural to them; if anything, they seem tempered, the toys' by the crepuscular light Helnwein throws around them and the kids' by the odd lack of hyperbole which such pre-teens - especially girls - are normally wont to display. These girls seem truly apprehensive, doubtful, suspicious, frightened, disbelieving, even slightly shell-shocked. Yet Helnwein does not exploit their seeming fragility so much as commute it to us; the way he paints these quietly fearful children provokes not our sympathy but our empathy. We take a more doting view of the several girls' faces with their eyes closed (two of them in the dark), but amidst their wide-eyed sisters, the sleep of these innocents also seems fleeting.

Gray Mouse 7

2014

Gottfried Helnwein has earned his reputation as a
Gothic hyper-realist whose cinematic style - cinematic in scale, in
appearance, and in subject - seeks to challenge institutional as well as
individual presuppositions. But that reputation flattens a complex
artistic personality into a kind of anti-entertainer, and Helnwein is
far more than the sum of his spectacles. In a show of seemingly very
quiet subjects, the Austrian-born, Los Angeles- and Ireland-based
painter examines the way we read, and read into, others' expressions.

In this case, the "others" are either inanimate objects - several heads
of toys (all Disney characters) - or children. Both children and toys
wear exaggerated expressions, but expressions that do not seem unnatural
to them; if anything, they seem tempered, the toys' by the crepuscular
light Helnwein throws around them and the kids' by the odd lack of
hyperbole which such pre-teens - especially girls - are normally wont to
display. These girls seem truly apprehensive, doubtful, suspicious,
frightened, disbelieving, even slightly shell-shocked.

Yet Helnwein does not exploit their seeming fragility so much as commute
it to us; the way he paints these quietly fearful children provokes not
our sympathy but our empathy. We take a more doting view of the several
girls' faces with their eyes closed (two of them in the dark), but
amidst their wide-eyed sisters, the sleep of these innocents also seems
fleeting.

Next to these grimly tender visages, the several depictions of young
boys theatrically got up in bandages and holding rifles or watching
television do seem as histrionic as Helnwein's reputation would invoke -
although they are some of the subtler, more disturbing images to
address school shootings and the general level of gun violence in
America. And the world.